Grandes Horizontales: the lives and legends of four 19th-century courtesans
Virginia Rounding Bloomsbury, 337pp, £20
The reproduction of Vittorio Matteo Corcos's 1887 painting An Elegant Lady on the cover of this book underlines Virginia Rounding's opening point: this pretty woman in tight-waisted black walking-dress with bustle and feathered hat with veil may be a courtesan or she may not. The women of the fin-de-siecle Parisian demi-monde and haut monde swapped fashions back and forth. Their surface similarity could be titillating. To a modern reader they seem like sisters under the fashionable skin, two split halves, in male fantasy, of one real woman.
The main difference between them was that bourgeois culture defined as respectable those women who got married and remained financially under male control, and labelled as wicked (if alluring) those who did not. Both categories of woman had a duty to supply sex to their protectors, and were paid for doing so.
Many girls became prostitutes because of poverty, many because they were raped and abused as children. Loss of virginity, by any route other than marriage, barred you from compassion. The grandes horizontales of this study, living on their looks and their youth, vulnerable to replacement, obliged to spend their earnings on sumptuous self-display, could at least imagine they were independent and free. They were despised by most virtuous females, effecting a policy of divide and rule. Plus ca change.
Prostitutes were regarded by the male rule-makers as necessary for siphoning off the sexual energy with which wives could not cope. That was their story, anyway. The 19th century was an era of classification, and the encyclopaedists energetically applied themselves to the task of pigeonholing, and therefore controlling, fallen women. Above the filles soumises and insoumises, the grisettes and lorettes and femmes galantes - right at the top of the hierarchy - were the grandes abandonnees, the grandes horizontales. All these women could, and were, written off in degrading slang terms that named them as animals, either pets or ravening beasts.
The tart with the heart of gold was known as une camelia. The prototype of the camellia - childish, sentimentally religious and repentant - was Marie Duplessis, fictionalised as Marguerite Gautier in the novel by Alexandre Dumas fils, La Dame aux camelias. This romantic portrait, Rounding argues, "affected all subsequent judgements and even physical descriptions of her, with the result that the 'real' Marie (who was also in part a fabrication of her own making) slipped into the shadows".
Rounding's second subject, La PaIva, was magicked by contemporary legend into a witch of insatiable sexual appetite and prowess. Her Jewishness fuelled further insults. Apollonie Sabatier, Rounding's third heroine, was by Baudelaire turned into a muse and by Auguste Clesinger into a sculpture, based on a cast, in sections, of her body, and meant to suggest the throes of orgasm. Cora Pearl, the Englishwoman whose life story concludes these linked biographies, was the only one to write her own memoir, a text which raises fascinating questions about autobiography's need to flatter, excuse and repress.
Rounding makes a good, valiant case for these women as interesting subjects in their own right, each one with her own version of courage and cupidity, generosity and financial savvy, intelligence and naivety. Although she can inform us about the contraceptive methods of the time - the vinegar-soaked douches and beribboned gut condoms - she can tell us little about the actual sex acts performed. The courtesan's skill was to enact an impossible contradiction: to display her body's charms while veiling them; to be both a public and ostentatious symbol of her lover's wealth and his hidden mistress who delighted him in private. (For details of sex, we need to go to the letters between Louise Colet and Flaubert.)
The horizontales seem to have been a rum lot, boasting and fearful by turns. Arguably as compelling as Rounding's biographical sketches is her portrait of the social and political world that produced them and in which they operated. She gives us a particularly lively picture of the gung-ho, swaggering bachelor milieu of the dandies, novelists and diarists, from Theophile Gautier to the Goncourts, who hung around the salons of the demi-monde and batted sex-talk back and forth between themselves in a weird battle-dore, sometimes homoerotic, sometimes misogynist. Odd to be a voyeur snooping over their shoulders as they refer to love letters as bum-wipes and to sex as filth.
Michele Roberts's latest novel is The Mistressclass (Little, Brown)
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